Blog Notifiations

Subscribe to FileHeads

Simply click on the icons below and you can be the first to know what's happening at FileHeads!

A Place for Your Stuff - George Carlin

Getting Organized in the Era of Endless

SQUALL PRESS, the publishing division of FileHeads, is pleased to announce Getting Organized in the Era of Endless: What to Do When Information, Interruption, Work and Stuff are Endless But Time is Not! Order yours today!

Posts Tagged ‘digital’

September is Disaster Preparedness Month. Recently I was interviewed by a Los Angeles Times reporter writing an article about things we might forget to do during a disaster. Stress is high. The brain gets overwhelmed. We’re often sleep deprived. It is a perfect storm, if you’ll excuse the pun, for forgetfulness. I am the author of Organize for Disaster: Prepare Your Family and Your Home for Any Natural or Unnatural Disaster and while it’s a great book, you won’t find these ‘Don’t Forget’ tips in it. Disaster preparedness is a very dynamic field. After every disaster, there is always more to learn and implement into our own personal disaster preparedness plans.

So, what might you forget to do?

Don’t forget to periodically download to a flash drive, digital information such as the account numbers and log in information for your web-based bank and brokerage accounts. Make sure you give the flash drive to a designated authorized representative, Executor or Power of Attorney in the event of your incapacitation or death or in the event the disaster wipes out the Internet. See my Creating Your Digital Estate Plan for more tips.

Don’t forget to download a local disaster preparedness app on your phone. A local app is going to tell you about school closings, shelter locations and roads that are flooded. Get one from your state Emergency Management Association or your county American Red Cross office.

Don’t forget to pack a cell phone charger in your disaster kit. I like this one. Solar chargers are good too, but then again many disasters are sunless events.

Don’t forget to set up a Twitter and a Facebook account. You will find it a useful way to communicate with family, friends and co-workers during a disaster even if you don’t use it for any other purpose.

Don’t forget to rehearse your home evacuation plan in the daytime and in the dark of night.

Unless the Earth changes its path around the Sun, it looks like 24 hours is going to be a pretty hardcore determinant of the partitions of time into days, hours and minutes, unless, of course, you are a zebrafish larva. Scientists say it has a gene that can be manipulated to change the larva’s circadian rhythms essentially extending the larva’s day. For the rest of us the breakthrough in time management is not that time can suddenly be recalibrated, but that the dictatorship of the clock holds less sway.

JM, a Princeton-based ADD coach, works to the beat of a non-clock drum. Without looking at the clock or using a to-do list, JM gets things done all day long and stays on time. “I know what kind of activities I do best throughout the day. From 6:30-8:30 a.m. without fail, I exercise, walk or swim. I also use that time to rehearse my day in my head. From 8:30- 10:30 I’m at the computer “eating the frog first.” JM also uses her magnificent working memory, kinesthetic memory and visual memory, as well as techniques like memory castles. “When I do errands on my commute, I map out in my mind the actual geography of my errands and rehearse them mentally so I do them in the most efficient way possible. In fact, I visualize my whole day in my head, kind of like a movie. I can actually picture myself moving through my day.” JM sees clients from 1-5 pm, then does wrap up from 5-6 pm. Afterwards it’s dinner, chores, and clean-up before she heads to bed. “I don’t need a schedule because I already know what I’m doing during certain times of the day; I call it ‘automaticity’.”

Susan Lannis has another name for it: time awareness. Lannis, who calls herself ‘the Time Liberator’, asserts that, “Time is becoming liberated from the clock because technology has released us from doing things face-to-face, in the same space at the same time as others.” She believes we are increasingly free to work in rhythm with time’s natural pulse. “Awareness of our natural pulse will replace time management,” Lannis claims. The pulse of time has four beats (my terminology, not Lannis’). In the first beat, we expend energy and create. We “hold up” a bit on the second beat, which Lannis characterizes as ‘evaluative.’ The third beat is a ‘gathering-in’ or a resting called a “contraction” followed by a fourth beat, another hold, as we prepare for the next pulse of creativity. Lannis’ book Time Awareness is due for publication at the end of 2015.

Recognizing that the nature of work is different in our digital society than in previous clock-oriented eras, some corporations are developing post-clock models, such as allowing employees to get paid for results rather than by the hour. If you accomplish your results in less than a workweek, you’re done working for the week; the Earth and Sun be damned! Thomas Merton said “… we should stop working, not for the purpose of recovering one’s lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labor….but for a Sabbath, a day for the sake of life.” In the post-clock society, when work is untethered from the clock, walls, bosses, geography and proximity, it is easy to reinvest our productivity gains into more work. We should instead strive to invest it into rest and leisure for “the sake of life.” What could be more important?

I misspoke. This is a blog in three parts, not the two parts I originally thought. Part I is available here. This is Part II. Part III is called ‘Post-Clock Time Management’ but in order to have it make sense, I need to finish up the history of time management in Part II below. So bear with me as I lay the groundwork for the exciting Part III ‘Post-Clock Time Management.’

In the 1920s the country prospered. The enormous post-WWI working age population clocked in at factories, meat packing plants and offices, but underlying economic dynamics would soon result in the Great Depression. Fully 25% of the population would be off the clock, jobless, aimless, and without the structure of normal modern life. So deeply felt were the economizing effects of the Depression that the children of the children of the Depression, the Baby Boomers, live by a waste-not-want-not ethic even in a time of prosperity. The massive spending necessary to build the industrial-military complex for WWII finally got people back on the clock. Even kids were on the clock as public schooling exploded with its tight classroom schedule. There’s nothing like the regimentation of a couple of wars to teach an entire society the time-saving power of routines. People worked 9 – 5, brushed their teeth twice daily, a habit brought back by returning soldiers, ate fish on Fridays and did the laundry on Wednesdays.

Time and Fast and Discretionary Time

The most significant development in the management of time in the 1950s was the integration of fast into daily life. The expectation of how quickly it should take to complete mundane household tasks changed. Electric blenders took the place of mixing bowls, vacuum cleaners replaced brooms and the washer and dryer moved into the house. TV taught us about the time management skill of dealing with distraction as many a seasoned cook burned the roast more than once distracted by the Ed Sullivan Show. Children would neglect homework watching television until the invention of TV dinners.

The word “instant” entered the popular lexicon when John Glenn orbited the Earth drinking an instant breakfast drink called Tang. Rockets let the fast genie out of the bottle forever. In the 1960s, automobiles, among the most efficient time-saving device ever created, were owned by the masses and specifically designed to go faster on America’s newly built highways with their off-ramps to fast-food. Multitasking, another time management skill, was taught to us by the automobile as we drove, listened to the radio, screamed at a backseat full of kids, rolled down the window at McDonalds and ate all at the same time. But it was still safer than the Bluetooth, texting, and driving of the new century that would nearly kill us.

For the first time in decades, people had discretionary time. Families vacationed. Employees enjoyed personal days off. Women entered the labor force in unprecedented numbers, creating more wealth and presenting a persistent time management dilemma characterized as balancing work and home. In 1969, we landed on the moon and that was better than drugs, sex and rock and roll. The civil rights movement and the anti-war movement inspired the women’s rights movement and the gay movement. People spent their time not just on making money but on raising their baby-booming families, raising their consciousness and raising the bar on empowerment of all stripes.

Knowledge Work and Time Management

During the 1970s the knowledge worker (KW) emerged. A knowledge worker is someone who creates value by applying judgment to his or her work, not just someone who labors to finish a prescribed task by the hour. The judgment needed was often how to use one’s time to optimize productivity. Sitting at a computer the KW of the 1970s had numerous responsibilities and tools to manage, including multiple telephones that had to be answered because there was no voicemail. Still, it was a relatively disconnected world, and the array of competing tasks was much smaller than it is today. One could still manage their time and actually get something done from beginning to end.

Electronic mail made its appearance, drastically cutting down the interruption of people dropping by the office unannounced. While it decreased long-winded phone calls, email also upped the ante on response time. A prospective client who requested a proposal by mail could expect it in a week. A response to an email request for a proposal shortened it to three days, then two. A phone message could still be courteously responded to in a day. Email required an answer within hours, thus response time was totally revolutionized.

Time Management, Values and Mobility

With all the lip service paid to knowledge work, judged by value and productivity rather than clock-time devotion, people began to work ridiculously long hours. In the 1980s, US corporations faced intense foreign competition and a slowing domestic market. Millions of middle managers were laid off and big business turned to consultants like the Franklin Institute to get more productivity out of a smaller workforce. The Franklin Institute (now called Franklin Covey) is based on Benjamin Franklin’s philosophy that happiness and inner peace do not come from owning things, but from identifying what is important in one’s life. Covey embodied this principle in his 1989 publication, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Unlike the time management books that preceded it with their emphasis on clock-driven efficiencies of the industrial age, Covey’s self-help books connected the management of time with the personal clarification of one’s life purposes, missions, goals and values. Provided with a two pound, three-ring binder, employees dutifully filled out the Day Planner’s planning aids, monthly and annual calendars, personal time management assessments, goal clarifications and personal mission statements to better align their time with their goals even while the work week swelled to over 40 hours a week.

Users of the time management systems were on the move, in planes, on trains, and traveling between offices. Franklin responded with the Pocket Planner that was eventually replaced by a personal digital assistant, most popularly the Blackberry. Devices proliferated and “work anywhere, anytime” was becoming a reality. Desktop computers at work and home were as standard as TVs. Email jumped the corporate fence to the family. Cell phones the size of cats appeared on the scene though without an internet connection.

Time and the Turn of the Century and Beyond

Digital society and the devices that appoint it pose several time management challenges, especially devices with screens. They deliver unmatched productivity, which simply means getting more done in less time. They also gobble up time to generate and respond to texts, tweets, calls, pings, beeps, tags, blogs, comments, friends, fans, emails and other activities associated with ever-expanding, interactive communication and connectivity. The devices meant to help us manage our time sometimes overwhelm us. In 2008, Americans talked, viewed, and listened to media, excluding the workplace, for 1.3 trillion hours, an average of 11 hours per person per day. By 2012, total consumption had increased to 1.46 trillion hours, or an average 13.6 hours per person per day. Time spent on digital activities displaces non-digital, healthful activities like family dinners, socializing with friends, physical exercise, being outdoors, real-time dating, sleep and sex with a real person. Because technology has made it possible to work without walls, bosses, and without regard for geography or time zones, the expectation of work has changed. In the words of Harold Taylor, a foremost authority on time management, “…the time-savings gained by technology have been offset by increases in complexity, choices, interruptions, expectations, stress, delays and errors.”

We are wirelessly tethered 24/7 to family, friends, fans, co-workers, customers, clients, vendors, suppliers, and perfect and imperfect strangers. The overall effect of endless connectivity is to blur the line between work and leisure. Even leisure-like activities like sharing family videos on Facebook, commenting on blogs, and following people on Twitter all take time. Time lost to endless connectivity includes family time, face-time, and real-time leisure. A Family Technology Policy helps you balance digital activities with non-digital activities, sets boundaries for the use of the devices inside of family life, and reclaims real-time activities. Every family is different. These guidelines will enable you to custom-build a Family Technology Policy. (For those in the organizing trade, creating a family technology policy can be directly transferred to your clients, increasing your service offerings, and enhancing your unique value.)

** Classes are recorded. Registrants have access to mp3 audio recordings of each class in case you miss one!